Classics to Comics Part 2

NICOLE LOBELLOAscension Episcopal SchoolYoungsville/Lafayette, LA

Scott McCloud Cartoonist & Comics Theorist

Theory of Comics in the Classroom

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (1993)

The Potential of Comics in Today’s World1989 Speech by Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin & Hobbes)

Peanuts has held my interest for many years because the strip is very funny on one level and very sad on another. Charlie Brown suffers - and suffers in a small, private, honest way. Schultz draws those quiet moments of self-doubt: Charlie Brown sitting on the bench, eating peanut butter, trying to work up the nerve to talk to the little red-haired girl – and failing. As a kid, I read Peanuts for the funny drawings and the jokes, and later I realized that the childhood struggles of the strip are metaphors for adult struggles as well. Peanuts is about the search for acceptance, security, and love, and how hard those self-affirming things are to find. The strip is also about alienation, about ambition, about heroes, about religion, and about the search for meaning and "happiness" in life. For a comic strip, it digs pretty deep…Comics are capable of being anything the mind can imagine. I consider it a great privilege to be a cartoonist. I love my work, and I am grateful for the incredible forum I have to express my thoughts. People give me their attention for a few seconds every day, and I take that as an honor and a responsibility. I try to give readers the best strip I'm capable of doing. I look at cartoons as an art, as a form of personal expression.

Comic Book/Strip vs. Comics [medium] [genre]

Illustration above from Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (1993)

“Let’s get one thing straight: sequentialart, cartoons, comics [meaning comic books], and graphic novels are not a genre; they are a format and a technique for tellinga story or conveying information. Second,comics are a form of social history that can be used to impart knowledge about a particular era. Captain America, Superman,Wonder Woman, Iron Man, Crime Does Not Pay, etc., are time capsules in the sameway that say, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Dante’s Inferno are.”~ Robert V. Smith [former Provost and senior V.P. of Texas Tech University, Foreword of Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art (2013)

Comics Through the Ages

Ancient Egyptian people c. 1300 B.C.Like in the Tombs of Menna (above), Ancient Egyptians used sequential,

two-dimensional art to express their world and its inhabitants

Comics Through the Ages

Mixtecan people of early 11th centuryStory of great king named 8 Deer Tiger’s Claw

who ruled in the Oaxaca valley of southern Mexico

Comics Through the Ages

Ancient Roman people c. 100 A.D.Trajan’s column stands almost 100 feet high in Rome and is a series of 20 colossal marble drums depicting the triumphs of

Roman Emperor Trajan and his army in battle against the Dacians

12th - 19th century A.D. -- Japanese Samurai Scrolls (above) and Events leading to Norman Conquest in the c. 1476 A.D. Bayeux Tapestry (below)

ComicsThrough the Ages

Some Say Comics are NOT a substitute for Classics …

I say…are we really arguing that point?

Comics are not Literary Junk Food

“The reading process in comics is an extension of the text. In text alone the processof reading involves word-to-image conversion. Comics accelerate that by providingthe image. When properly executed, it goes beyond conversion and speed and becomes the seamless whole…[Comics] is entitled to be regarded as literaturebecause the images are employed as language…When this language is employedas a conveyance of ideas and information, it separates itself from mindlessentertainment. This makes comics a storytelling medium.”

Will Eisner, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (1996)

Why Comics IN the Classroom?Josh Elder, founder and president of Reading With Pictures, sums up the strengthsof comics as educational tools with his “Three E’s of Comics.”

Engagement: Comics impart meaning through the reader’s active engagement withwritten language and juxtaposed sequential images. Readers must actively makemeaning from the interplay of text and images, as well as by filling in the gapsbetween panels (aka the “gutters”).

Efficiency: The comic format conveys large amounts of information in a short time.This is especially effective for teaching content in the academic subject areas. [“Amplification through simplification,” as described by Scott McCloud]

Effectiveness: Processing text and images together leads to better recall and transferof learning. Neurological experiments have shown that we process text and imagesin different areas of the brain (Dual-Coding Theory of Cognition). These experimentsalso indicate that pairing an image with text leads to increased memory retentionfor both. With comics, students not only learn the material faster, they learn it better.

http://teach.com/comics-in-the-classroom/why-comics

Why Comics in MY Classroom?1. Comics contain the same story elements and literary devices as narrative stories. Characters, conflict, resolution, setting, symbolism, theme, point of view---all of these and more are present in comics.2. Comics provide built-in context clues. Because comics are visual, even if the text is difficult, the visuals give the reader support in comprehending the story.3. Reading a comic book is a different process of reading using a lot of inference. With a comic, readers must rely on the dialogue and illustrations. The reader must infer (a complex reading strategy) what is not written out by a narrator.4. Readers need variety in their reading diet. Monotony = boredom…need I say more?5. We are an increasingly visual culture, and the visual sequencing of comic books makes sense to kids. [See academic research on Digital Natives]6. Reading comic books may lead to drawing and writing comics. Linking reading and writing is essential. Comic book creation is particularly enticing for kids who prefer drawing to formal writing, but will make exceptions for dialogue bubbles.7. The selection of comic books and graphic novels is bigger, better, and reaches a wider age-range than ever before. Every month more comic books and graphic novels enter the market for younger readers, providing more and more choices.8. Comics are fun to read! Reading can and should be fun. Which is why I love to read YA…because it is enjoyable! I love reading literature, too. See # 4 above

Borrowed and enhanced from http://imaginationsoup.net/2011/08/8-reasons-to-let-your-kids-read-comics/

But it’s a Comic book…not a Classic

But I Want My Students to READ…American journalist and author Tom Wolf noted: “For the last hundred years, the subject of reading has been connected quite directly to the concept of literacy;…learning to read…has meant learning to read words…but…reading has gradually come under closer scrutiny. Recent research has shown that the reading of words is but a subset of a much more general human activity which includes symbol decoding, information integration and organization…Indeed, reading—in the most general sense—can be thought of as a form of perceptual activity. The reading of words is one manifestation of this activity; but there are many others—the reading of pictures, maps, circuit diagrams, musical notes…”

“Reading Reconsidered” in Harvard Educational Review (47.3 – 1977)

But I Want My Students to LEARN LITERARY SKILLS…

Comics and graphic novels can be used as a “point of reference” to bridge what students already know with what they have yet to learn, according to Shelley Hong Xu, associate professor in the department of teacher education at California State University, Long Beach. For example, comics and graphic novels can teach about making inferences, since readers must rely on pictures and just a small amount of text. By helping students transfer this skill, she says, teachers can lessen the challenge of a new book. Xu uses comics and graphic novels in her reading methods course. She asks preservice teachers to read an unfamiliar comic or graphic novel and then record the strategies they used to comprehend the text. “I think that every preservice and inservice teacher needs to experience this activity in order to better understand literacy knowledge and skills that students use with reading comics and graphic novels.”

“Using Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom” in NCTE The Council Chronicle (Sept. 05)

But I Want My Students to EXPERIENCE the Classics …

The goal of this presentation is NOT an “all or nothing” proposal. I am not rashly suggesting we toss out our pieces of classic literature from our library shelves or curricula. Rather, my goal is to ask each of us to consider what are we really aiming for in our classrooms…what are the GOALS we are striving for each day, each year…with each child? How do we best instruct and assess in order to achieve these goals?

accessibility

activating background knowledgequestioning

searching for information

summarizingIntegrating information graphically

structuring a story

elaborative interrogation

question-answer relations

building of vocabulary

fluency

Developing reading comprehension

prediction

sensitivity to text structure

MetacognitionGrant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design provides one particularly effective approach to marrying standards or goals to effectivebest practices in the classroom and supports the following: •Learning is enhanced when teachers think purposefully about learning• We should focus curriculum and teaching on development and deepening of student understanding and transfer of learning (ability to effectively use content knowledge and skill)•Understanding is revealed when students autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic performance•Effective curriculum is planned backward from long-term, desired results through a three- stage design process (desired results, evidence, and learning plan) --- this process helps avoid treating the textbook as the curriculum rather than a resource, and activity- oriented teaching in which no clear priorities and purposes are apparent•Teachers are coaches of understanding, not mere purveyors of content knowledge, skill, or activity. They focus on ensuring that learning happens, not just teaching (or assuming that what was taught was learned); they always aim and check for successful meaning and transfer by the learner•Regularly reviewing units and curriculum and a continual improvement approach enhances curricular quality and effectiveness and provides engaging and professional discussions, as well as informing needed adjustments in curriculum and instruction so that student learning is maximized

http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/siteASCD/publications/UbD_WhitePaper0312.pdf

Thinking about Adaptations

For the reader, spectator, or listener, adaptation is unavoidably a kind of intertextualityif the receiver is acquainted with the adapted text. It is an ongoing dialogical process,as Mikahail Bakhtin would have said, in which we compare the work we already knowwith the one we are experiencing…is an interpretive doubling, a conceptual flipping backand forth between the work we know and the work we are experiencing ”

A Theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutcheon (2012)

“Hutcheon and Sanders [Adaptation and Appropriation by Julie Sanders] explain adaptations become new works of art, and the new work then reflects its textualinspiration…the visual techniques that the adapters use give added insight into how weinterpret meaning…[the] introduction of telling visual images, in combination with intelligently selected text, can direct the reader toward themes, motifs, metaphors, andbackground issues present but not always apparent in the original versions of classicliterature” Drawn from the Classics edited by Tabachnick & Saltzman

Thinking about Adaptations

Both Sanders and Hutcheon address the inadequacy of fidelity as a gauge of adaptationquality…Hutcheon emphasizes the importance of the creative process in adaptation andand discusses the importance of intentionality in the analysis of it…the adapter’s interpre-tation of a given text can follow or expand on historical meanings of texts or provide material for possible new meanings or, through ambiguity or word/image choice, canfacilitate the graphic novel reader’s own interpretations of meaning. The potential fornew interpretations and the discussion of established one then adds to the value of thesegraphic novels for scholarship”

Drawn from the Classics edited by Tabachnick & Saltzman

Harmony of Classics AND Comics“A way to create meaning for students learning about literature is to introduce them to the various critical approaches for analyzing text”

“But This Book Has Pictures! The Case for Graphic Novels in an AP Classroom” by Lisa Cohen http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/members/courses/teachers_corner/158535.html

• Make complex concepts approachable

• Teach visual rhetoric terms and techniques

• Incorporate literary elements and theories into the teaching of graphic novels

• Apply various critical approaches

Fruitful Discussions about Classics AND Comics

The discussions we as educators should be having with each other and ourstudents include the following:•How does the graphic novel reading experience differ from the reading of the text-only work?•How does the combination of image and word create a new perception and interpretation of a prose text?•What makes a graphic novel adaptation effective or ineffective?•What can theory add to an understanding of these adaptations?•How can graphic novel adaptations contribute to an understanding of the adapted texts? Stephen Tabachnick and Esther Saltzman (eds.),

Introduction of Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works (2015)

The adaptation should be evaluated in terms of its success as a comic book and how creatively it uses and expands on the artistic and technical possibilities of the medium. Does it use the full range of verbal and visual techniques peculiar to the comic book as a form of creative expression? M. Thomas Inge, Comics as Culture (1990)

Classics AND Comics in the ClassroomMethodology for meaningfully incorporating comics in our classrooms and utilizingcomics to introduce classics, enrich classics, make classics accessible, or re-envision classics abounds in a plethora of professional resources. Here are a few ways in which to see the value of teaching classics via comics:

•Parallel Texts: utilizing both original classic text and comics adaptations side-by-side (scene by scene) for deeper, intertextual analysis of the both works

•Literary & Visual Terms: using resources like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics supports teachers in blending visual/graphic terms and literary terms (already familiar to the teacher) and sharing these with students via texts

•Compare/Contrast: analyzing using Venn diagrams and compare/contrast essays as vehicles for students to transfer insight regarding similarities and differences in original classic text and comics

•Student Creation: creating comics versions (writing, illustrating, printing) of classic pieces of literature

Many websites exist to stimulate lesson ideas – Check out the following:http://www.edutopia.org/comic-books-teaching-literacyhttp://www.ncte.org/magazine/archives/122031http://www.openeducation.net/2008/01/23/innovative-teaching-comic-books-in-the-classroom/http://www.openeducation.net/2008/01/24/innovative-teaching-chris-wilson-discusses-the-comic-book-movement/

Finding Classics in ComicsClassical Comics -- http://www.classicalcomics.com

Campfire -- http://www.campfire.co.in/t/genre/classics

Papercutz / Illustrated Classics -- http://papercutz.com/comics/classics-illustrated-2

Barnes & Noble -- http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/?category_id=2274161

Amazon -- http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=fiction+and+literature+classics+comic+and+novel+graphic+adaptations

GoodReads --http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/34639.Graphic_Novel_Adaptations_of_Classic_Books

Google -- For more lists, type search phrases like the following:Fiction and literature classics comic and novel graphic adaptations

One Last Comment on SnobberyOf ANY Kind…and

Achieving BalanceInside and Outside

The Classroom

Before we too hastily judge comics or become snobs of any sort (either wildly pro-classics OR pro-comics…let us recall that Mark Twain’s Huck Finn was publicized in the New York Times in 1885 under the headline “TRASHY and VICIOUS,” in reference to the Concord Public Library’s banning of Mr. Clemens’ book that “degenerates into a gross trifling with every feeling” whose stories are “no better in tone than the dime novels which flood the blood-and-thunder reading population.”

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/archival/18850319ConcordLibraryBan.pdf

Classrooms as Centers That Foster a

LOVE of ReadingA Perfect Time to Explore a Fun LessonInvolving High-Interest Graphic Novels

or other Medium of Comics (strips, comicbooks, et cetera) with your Students (:

Free Internet Sources – Comics in the Classroom

• https://secure.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Books/Sample/03920Chap01_x.pdf• http://www.ncte.org/magazine/archives/122031• http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/not-funnies.html• http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/books/review/Gee-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0• http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/education/26comics.html?_r=0• http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/11GRAPHIC.html• http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/members/courses/teachers_corner/180039.html• http://www.readingwithpictures.org• http://cbldf.org/2013/07/cbldf-releases-raising-a-reader-a-resource-for-parents-and-educators/• http://www.floobynooby.com/pdfs/Will_Eisner-Theory_of_Comics_and_Sequential_Art.pdf• http://comicsintheclassroom.net• http://teach.com/comics-in-the-classroom/why-comics• http://www.edutopia.org/blog/graphic-novels-comics-andrew-miller• http://www.teachingdegree.org/2009/07/05/comics-in-the-classroom-100-tips-tools-and-resources-for-tea

chers/• http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1055&context=englishdiss• http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2012/aug/26/teaching-with-comic-books• http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/profdev/profdev105.shtml• http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/how-comic-books-are-creating-super-classrooms/

380236/• https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/student-reading-through-comics• http://www.artwayalliance.org/blog/2015/1/7/science-fiction-and-comics-in-the-classroom• https://www.pinterest.com/casadelindquist/graphic-novels-in-education/• http://www.graphicclassroom.org/p/best-comics-for-your-classroom-list-for.html